The New Republic

The New Republic

The Affordability Con

By and large, affordable private goods have replaced public ones. That's not a good thing.

Spencer Platt/Getty

For over thirty years now, there’s been a specter haunting America. You
can see it codified in our most contentious laws, touted by leading reform
candidates, and offered by brands looking to tap into the ever-widening class
of value shoppers. Its name? Affordability. But what does it actually mean? The
answer is more complicated than it seems.

For a few decades now, the concept of affordability has been used as a
tool to remove vital institutions from the public and then offer them back to the public via the private
market. Great education would now be available through subsidized “affordable”
loans to flagship public institutions, whereas before a summer job would pay
the tuition for most in-state colleges; housing speculation has priced out the
lower and middle-classes from major American cities, with “affordable” housing being
offered in return on some of the floors of new market-rate developments; health
care companies are now actively subsidized by the government through exchanges
meant to make care “affordable” without cutting into any company’s profits.
What were once rights, in other words, have become commodities.

In the post-war era of the late 1970s, collectivization projects—like
large-scale public housing, the GI Bill, expansion of public universities,
universal healthcare for the poorest Americans, etc.—were quietly gutted by privatization
efforts led by small-government ideologues who individualized how our
government spends money and directs policy. The federal government pivoted away
from subsidizing the incomes of poor people to focusing on handouts to the already
wealthy. Trickle-down economics went from bunk theory to federal mandate. By
the time a Democrat returned to the White House in 1992, the idea that a
private marketplace was much better suited to meet the most important needs of
American citizens was sacrosanct. What was once “public”—provided freely or
very cheaply by the government for its people—had been replaced with goods referred
to as “affordable.” Citizens had been left to shoulder their cost.

But what did it all mean? The affordability revolution was supposed to
optimize public services; we were to trust the market in its infinite wisdom,
and forget the fact that “the market” was (and is) composed of fallible humans.
Hadn’t we struck a grand bargain between the masters of capitalism and the
American people, the government wisely inserting controls into the marketplace
to ensure that no citizen goes without shelter, health care, or access to
knowledge? Sadly, no. We sold ourselves out. The idea of an “affordable” good
is one that’s only affordable because you have no other choice. It just means
that so many tax dollars have already flowed to the private interests that those
same companies can afford to charge slightly
less than they do regularly.

The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010—possibly the greatest
achievement of affordability politics—put health care within reach of millions
of uninsured Americans. The government did this by subsidizing the payment of insurance
plans, leaving company profits intact but putting health insurance within
financial reach for low-income workers. Even so, insurance on the marketplace is
still out of some people’s price range. The biggest success of the
Affordable Care Act was its
expansion of Medicaid, which simply skips the subsidization of corporate profits
and just had the government pay for health care on its own for its poorest
citizens. Shockingly, that proviso has proven to be the most
cost-effective measure included in the ACA.

Even in liberal New York City, the goal posts for the public’s rights
have been moved far, far down the field. Earlier this month, the City Council
passed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature housing policy: two acts known as
“Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and Zoning for Quality and Affordability.” Each
aim to tackle the affordable housing crisis in New York City, where the cost of
living has pushed low-income New Yorkers out of the city or into homeless shelters.

The plans operate by giving concessions to developers (higher zoning
regulations, tax breaks, actual subsidies) in exchange for affordable new
apartments. De Blasio’s plan is similar to former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s,
whose 80/20 plan (80 percent market rate dwellings, 20 percent affordable)
barely made a dent in the housing crisis—recently, we’ve seen the homeless
population in New York City soar to upwards of 60,000 people. De Blasio’s plan was
met with outrage and scorn from community groups, who formed a coalition named Real
Affordability for All in response. The groups wanted to emphasize just how
flawed a concept the idea of affordability had become; the metric of
affordability, Area Median Income, isn’t even determined by the city’s own
median income, but those
of its wealthy suburbs as well. Their call for “real” affordability lobbied
for a 50/50 split between market-rate and low-income housing for all new developments; they urged a
return to the time when government mandated the construction of new homes for
low-income peoples, instead of just handing concessions to developers in the
hope they would follow through with promises. (Often times, they
don’t.) At the last minute, Real Affordability for All signed
on to the housing plan in exchange for a compromise: The plan would include
options for developers to build apartments for New Yorkers with especially
low-incomes, but the number of those units would be left to developers.

Even though “affordability” replaced simple public goods, the idea was
never to help Americans, because privatization is necessarily about company
profit. That’s the whole point of the market: It rests on human beings driven
by money, which means it’s not, in the end, about people. Across the country,
activists are seeing the limits of this type of politics. It’s no wonder that a
candidate promising free college and the long-delayed promise of universal
healthcare is surging
in the polls. Americans are looking at their housing and health care
options and want to be able to afford something much, much better.

When nominally liberal politicians like President Obama or New York Mayor
Bill de Blasio talk affordability, they’re not speaking about whether citizens
can afford something. They mean to ask how much they can do to entice private
interests. And as a political concept, affordability isn’t tangible. Our own
tax money is used to puff up marketplaces that no longer serve the needs of the
average American. Affordable goods—in the form of health care, education, and
housing—have become a rallying cry for the left. In practice, though, it really
only means one thing: That you got sold out.